By John Duncan Talbird. In 1988, Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize. Five years later, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first black woman of any nationality to win it. It seemed to be the final bullet fired in the US Culture Wars that sprang […]

By Yun-hua Chen. Very few films can capture the feelings of a dream in an audio-visually mesmerizing way. What Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch achieved in their cinematic portraits of dreams and dreaminess is unparalleled, and now we can also comfortably add the young Chinese director Gan Bi […]

By Elias Savada. Fifty years ago (gulp!) I never made it to Woodstock. I didn’t even try, although I had a hallucinogenic blast four years later at the 1973 Summer Jam in Watkins Glen (instant weekend population: 600,000). $10 to see the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band […]

By Thomas Puhr. Denys Arcand’s The Fall of the American Empire (2018) asks a question that most never have the luxury to ponder: What does one do when they have too much money? This moral conundrum confronts Pierre-Paul Daoust (Alexandre Landry) after two duffel bags full of money from a […]

A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. What does it mean to “document” a displaced people? Do humanitarian films, while helpful in raising awareness, inherently depict a people as helpless victims? How should the displaced go about documenting themselves? Are their own representations, while providing a sense of agency for both […]